Frederik Pohl, '74: "We Purchased People" and, w/ C M Kornbluth, "The Gift of Garigolli," and "Mute Inglorious Tam"

I recently unleashed upon the interwebs a blog post casting aspersions on some stories from the 1970s by Grand Master Frederik Pohl.  Today we'll address the same topic, Pohl's 1970s work, but with a little guidance from SF readers who suggested in the comments to that post that Pohl's better work includes the particular story "We Purchased People" and as well as collaborations with fellow Futurian C. M. Kornbluth.  "We Purchased People" was first published in 1974, and in that exciting year, the year of the resignations of Richard Nixon, Golda Meir, and Willy Brandt, the year your humble blogger turned three years old, Pohl also published two collabs with Kornbluth, who died in 1958.  Let's check these 1974 stories out!

(There's some juicy gossip out there about the relationship between Pohl and Kornbluth, and Pohl and Mrs. Kornbluth after her husband's early death, that I won't go into here, but I mention it briefly in a blog post from earlier this year in which a book edited by Mary Kornbluth figures; at that post are links to material written by Pohl about the Kornbluths and some evidence that Mrs. Kornbluth resented Pohl.)

"We Purchased People" by Frederik Pohl

People really like this story; after its debut in Final Stage, an anthology of "ultimate" SF stories edited by Edward Ferman and our hero Barry N. Malzberg but famously mangled in its first edition by a woman at the publisher, "We Purchased People" has been reprinted numerous times, including in Terry Carr's Best Science Fiction of the Year #4, Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann's Aliens!, David Hartwell's Foundations of Fear, and a bunch of foreign anthologies.  Having read it now, in my copy of the restored paperback edition of Final Stage, I have to report that the  hype is fully justified--"We Purchased People" is a great science fiction story that speculates about Earth's possible relationship with space aliens, a great human story about abnormal psychology and people's psychological responses to an abnormal situation, and a great horror story full of gruesome and evil deeds with a cunningly developed plot; with perfect pacing, Pohl skillfully builds a foundation of mountingly disturbing revelations that leads very convincingly to the final nightmare twist.  Thumbs up!

The Earth some years ago was contacted by aliens from a distant star system.  The aliens have a sort of radio that can send messages, much faster than the speed of light, straight into people's brains.  In fact, if a person has the right equipment connected to his noggin, the aliens can control him like a puppet!  (Cf. Robert Silverberg's 1968 "Passengers.")  The governments of Earth were quite willing to sell to the aliens heinous criminals for use as puppets, and through the puppets the aliens can learn all about Earth and make business deals with Earth people.  The aliens sell to the Earth technology of tremendous value to us--such technology has prevented war, for example.  From us the aliens buy art treasures and specimens of plants and uniquely Earthly stuff like that, even though the rockets that carry these items will take many centuries to reach their new owners.  Numerous alien races contact the Earth, and they each have their peculiar idiosyncrasies; this being a horror story, these idiosyncrasies are designed to make the reader uneasy.

Like half or so of the text of "We Purchased People" is a first-person narrative in the voice of a white American criminal who has been purchased by some particularly disgusting aliens.  Pohl does a good job of describing what day-to-day life is like for this guy as a slave of the aliens, and of building up sympathy for this guy in the reader while at the same time stoking our suspicions of him.  We start out feeling pity for this joker and hostility to the aliens and the human authorities for the way they treat him, but then we realize how monstrously this guy behaves if left to his own devices we have a moral dilemma on our hands.  The narrator is so dangerous, his crimes so shocking and outrageous, that we are left little reason to feel bad for him, especially since trade with the aliens has done so much to enhance human peace and prosperity.  Maybe the crime against his liberty, maybe the existence of slavery in 20th or 21st century America, is justified by all the benefits of interstellar trade?  And then at the end of the story Pohl has the aliens do something so horrible to him that maybe we feel bad for him again--or maybe not, as it is his own foul nature that, in only a slightly oblique way, leads to the mind-shattering horror to which he is subjected.

You'll remember that the mainstream-like story by Pohl we read recently, "I Remember the Winter," seemed to deny that human beings had agency and could be blamed for any regrettable results of their behavior.  "We Purchased People" has a much more interesting and challenging take on human agency and responsibility.  On the one hand, one might argue that the main character is not really morally responsible for murdering little girls because he is mentally ill, and, of course, the whole story depicts people under the ruthless control of more powerful people--a leftist can read "We Purchased People" as an allegory of how under the market economy we are all slaves whipped or robots programmed by "capital" or merchants or the decadent rich or bourgeois liberal governments rabidly pursuing GDP.  Even for non-leftists, the story raises the question of how much infringement on individual freedom we are willing to accept in exchange for safety, order and wealth.  (We might also point out that Pohl hints that the communist rulers in Moscow and Peking, and Third World dictators, are even more eager to sell undesirables to the aliens than is the US government.)

But, at the same time it depicts people who are under the control of mental illness and the rich and powerful, Pohl's story also portrays a main character who does seem responsible for his black fate, who does exercise free will.  For one thing, we see him carefully calculate all his moves during periods when the aliens temporarily relinquish their control over him--he clearly demonstrates agency, the ability of the individual to assess risk and allocate resources in pursuit of the personal goals he has selected.  And the mind-blowing horror the protagonist suffers in the end of the story is an outgrowth of his own murderous fetish--is Pohl arguing that people really are the authors of their own fates, even in a largely or apparently deterministic world?  

"We Purchased People" works as emotion-triggering entertainment as it generates suspense and horror with all that creepy sex and horrendous violence, and works as thought-provoking science fiction with its depictions of both free will-oriented and deterministic views of human life, and the possible character of interstellar trade.  Very good--highly recommended to horror fans and to fans of SF that makes you think about the realities of human-alien interactions and the nature of human agency.

"The Gift of Garigolli" by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth

Oy, here we have a long and tedious domestic comedy with a little SF content and bland satire of the business world tacked on to it.  The structure and some of the themes of the story reminded me of those old black and white comedies like Mr. Blandings Builds His Dreamhouse, what with the hapless middle-class husband, his troublemaking wife, and the deus ex machina resolution of the plot.  In the Pohl/Kornbluth collection Our Best: The Best of Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, Pohl seems to hint he knows "The Gift of Garigolli" is bad (and seems to be trying to blame Kornbluth for the story's inadequacy), and compares the story to I Love Lucy.  Mr. Blandings Builds His Dreamhouse is tolerable because Cary Grant and Myrna Loy are quite likable, and I Love Lucy is lovable because Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz, and William Frawley ably portray characters easy to identify with, and "The Gift of Garigolli" utterly lacks any corresponding virtues.  The story's characters are ciphers whose motivations are difficult to discern and it drags aimlessly along at a snail's pace for like 20 pages, alternately lulling the reader to sleep and irritating him.  Bad.

Dupoir (a joke name for DuPont?) is a suburbanite commuter who works in PR for the plastics industry, trying to inspire in the populace good feelings about plastic.  He writes scripts for radio spots and works with a guy in his office with what I assume is a joke name, Jack Denny, who draws sexy girls for the weekly plastics newsletter.  Environmental activists are one of his headaches.  But he's got a bigger headache.  When his brother-law-law, an addict, checked himself into a rehab center, Dupoir's wife co-signed the papers.  Brother-in-law bugged out to the coast to try to get into movies without settling his bill, and now Dupoir is on the hook for the rehab center's fee--over 14,000 simoleons!  Dupoir can't afford it and he is being sued by the rehab center and fears he will lose his house.

Much of the story is a first-person narrative in the voice of Dupoir, and much of the story's comedy and SF content consists of Dupoir doing a pastiche of Edgar Rice Burroughs, as if he is Tarzan; for example, he describes his competing for a seat on public transit the way ERB might describe Lord Greystoke struggling against some African beast.  Dupoir's Tarzan fixation, the stuff about plastic, and the space aliens, are like elements from three different stories just jammed together--each has no connection to the other.

Yes, space aliens.  The rest of the humor and SF content consists of the fact that Dupoir is under surveillance by teeny tiny airborne E.T.s.  These aliens are follow Dupoir around--he thinks they are fruit flies that are inexplicably attracted to him.  Sections of the text of "The Gift of Garigolli" are communiques from the leader of these alien observers back to HQ, discussing the various directives that serve as the guiderails for how the aliens are to interact with natives.  The aliens are supposed to help the natives, and when they perceive that Dupoir is in need of cash they try to create some gold for him through manipulation of molecules.  This does not work.   

Dupoir goes to a bar to drown his troubles, and meets another man trying to drown his troubles.  It turns out this guy is owner of the rehab center, depressed because he is owed 14,000 bucks.  The two get drunk and end up in the man's office at the rehab center, but nothing happens there and we readers wonder why the authors saw fit for them to go there.  In the morning these guys are both at Dupoir's house, where the tiny flying aliens have devised a process that turns plastic into alcohol.  This self-sustaining process enables Dupoir to pay his debts and also solves the problem of plastic litter, getting the environmental activists off the back of the plastics industry.

This story is horrible.  The plot is a total mess, the jokes are lame, and as I have suggested, I don't even feel as if the characters' motivations make sense, though maybe I missed the explanations of why they were doing what they were doing because the story was so boring my eyes were glazing over during the explanations.   

Thumbs down!

I may have hated "The Gift of Garigolli," but the world welcomed it with open arms!  Inexplicable!  You can find this half-baked dish of garbage in Donald Wollheim's The 1975 Annual World's Best SF and multiple Galaxy retrospectives.  Were editors buying this story in an effort to help Kornbluth's widow?  I don't get it.              

"Mute Inglorious Tam" by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth

Here we have another posthumous collaboration between Pohl and his toothpaste averse friend that won accolades.  "Mute Inglorious Tam" debuted in a special anniversary issue of F&SF and Lester del Rey included it in his annual "Best of" anthology.  In 1977 Edward Ferman put it in the twenty-second of the Best of F&SF volumes.  In 1992 Mike Resnick included it in an anthology of recursive or meta SF stories.  Well, let's try to read "Mute Inglorious Tam" with an open mind, leaving behind any resentment resulting from our reading of "The Gift of Garigolli" and refusing to be swayed by the spirit of contrariness that whispers "just because del Rey and Ferman and Resnick like it doesn't mean you have to like it," true though that may be.

Sometimes you'll encounter people who think life in medieval Europe had a lot going for it, that peasants didn't work as many hours as do today's suburbanite commuters, that religion and the clearly defined social order gave life meaning and structure, that the food wasn't giving people diabetes and the air wasn't giving people cancer, etc.  And of course you'll encounter people who will suggest life in medieval Europe was a nightmarish hell where everybody was impoverished and the man who lived to see his 30th birthday was a true rara avis.  "Mute Inglorious Tam" takes the latter tack, depicting medieval Sussex as a sort of racist police state, the Normans lording it over the Saxons, everyone living in poverty and discomfort, people getting the death penalty for thought crimes against the lord or the priests.  

"Mute Inglorious Tam" is more like a tendentious history lesson full of questionable recreations (like the recreations on true crime and history TV shows, where instead of just interviewing a cop about the bank robber he nabbed or a historian about the president whose biography he penned, the TV producers hire some clown to slap on a balaclava or a tricorn and prance around, pretending to be a bandit or the father of our country for the supposed benefit of viewers) than an actual story with a plot and everything.  Lots of time is spent on the geography and economics of the Sussex village at the center of the story.  As for the recreations, our protagonist, Tam, gets himself mixed up in plenty of domestic violence.

Tam isn't just a peasant who knocks down and then kicks his wife when she neglects to brew his beer.  Tam is a dreamer!  Working the fields, he dreams of corn that is more fecund.  Guiding a wagon, he dreams of a self-propelled cart.  Looking at his dirty village, he dreams of a village that is clean.  As Pohl tells us explicitly in the intros to "Mute Inglorious Tam" in F&SF and in Our Best, Tam, in a future milieu, would be a science fiction writer.

This story is competently written on a sentence by sentence basis--the descriptions of the setting and of the domestic violence are engaging--and I find the debate over how bad life really was in the Middle Ages interesting, so we can call "Mute Inglorious Tam" an acceptable sort of gimmick piece aimed directly at the niche market of SF readers committed to the idea of progress.

**********

It's been a day of extremes here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  In "We Purchased People" we have something of a classic, a top notch piece of work.  And in "The Gift of Garigolli" we have something I am a little surprised was even published in this state, it is so poor.  That's the power of a bankable name, I guess.  

Thanks to my commenters for guiding me to these stories, all of which are challenging in their own ways.  In  our next episode we'll read a novel by an even more bankable name than Fred Pohl's.

Robert E. Howard: "The Good Knight," "Knife-River Prodigal," and "The House of Suspicion"

I recently went to Antiques Crossroads in Hagerstown, MD, where I saw a bunch of cool things and even purchased a few.  One of my purchases was a copy of the 1976 Zebra paperback edited by Glenn Lord, The Second Book of Robert E. Howard, a wide-ranging collection of stories and poems by Howard supplemented by introductions by Glenn Lord and illustrations by MPorcius fave Jeff Jones.  Let's check out three stories from the book that star Howard characters not nearly as famous as Conan, Kull or Solomon Kane.

"The Good Knight" AKA "Kid Galahad" (1931)

Nowadays the detective and various speculative fiction pulp magazines are well-remembered, but also popular during the pulp era were magazines of sports stories, and Howard sold quite a volume of material to them.  (Robert E. Howard Foundation has printed four volumes of Howard's boxing fiction and each volume is over 300 pages.)  "The Good Knight" is just such a story, making its debut in Sport Story Magazine under the title "Kid Galahad" and starring light-heavyweight boxer Kid Alison.  This is a somewhat slight but entertaining story, like a fun episode of a TV sitcom.  It feels odd comparing Robert E. Howard to P. G. Wodehouse or Jack Vance, but the slangy first-person narration and dialogue, delivered by a likable but somewhat confused and ignorant protagonist, and "The Good Knight"'s obvious but fun joke premise (a premise at least as old as Don Quixote) and all the little jokes along the way make reading the story a pleasant experience not unlike reading some of the works of those more critically acclaimed creators of Bertie Wooster and Cugel the Clever.

Our narrator is Kid Alison himself; he is on the West Coast while his manager is on the East Coast trying to set up a lucrative bout for Kid.  In hopes of keeping Kid out of trouble, a member of his entourage accompanies him to the library and suggests he read a book about Sir Galahad.  Kid becomes fired with the idea of emulating that noble knight, of helping damsels in distress and vanquishing malefactors.  So when he runs into a young woman who has been hit by her boyfriend after she caught him with another girl, Kid vows to teach her assailant a lesson.  Said assailant is a fellow boxer, a famously dirty fighter, and the woman contrives a situation that puts Kid and this knave in the ring together.  In the end, Kid knocks out the dirty boxer in front of a crowd and a sports journalist, buoying his career.  But the fickle woman regrets putting her boyfriend in such a tough situation and Kid finds himself, painfully, on the receiving end of her anger.  (This story illustrates the reality that abused women often defend their abusers in a sort of jocular way that people today may find in bad taste.)

A trifling thing that is fun, though the climactic bout may be a little too long.  In 1975 "The Good Knight" was printed in the fanzine Fantasy Crossroads, and in Britain in 1977 it appeared in The Robert E. Howard Omnibus.

"Knife-River Prodigal" (1937)

From sports to Westerns--there were also a bunch of Western pulps back in the day, and Howard wrote for those as well.  "Knife-River Prodigal" appeared first in Cowboy Stories; in 1975 it was brought back into print in the fanzine REH: Lone Star Fictioneer and since then has appeared in several Howard collections. 

As with "The Good Knight," in "Knife-River Prodigal" we have a first-person narrator who is something of an ignoramus who is good at finding trouble, starring in a somewhat silly humor story, much of the humor of which rests on unusual syntax and slang.  ("Git goin' before I scatters yore remnants all over the floor."  "Air we men or air we jassacks?")  The comedy business in this story is inferior to that in "The Good Knight," but the action is better.

Bruckner J. Grimes is a young Texan, a real hellraiser from a family of hellraisers who is always getting into feuds and fights.  (The central joke of "Knife-River Prodigal" is that Texas is a violent place.)  He causes so much trouble his family actually tells him to leave Knife River and to go to "Californy" to prospect for gold.  So he steals his brother's horse and heads west; upon arriving in New Mexico, thinking he is in California, he starts chipping away at some rocks, hoping to discover gold thereby.  Grimes gets mixed up with a band of desperadoes who decide to keep him around for laughs, and, when they terrorize the innocent folk of a small town, our hero belatedly realizes what's what and with his six-guns, bowie knife, and fists sets things to rights.

A pleasant diversion.   

   

"The House of Suspicion" (1976)

Here we have one of Howard's stories starring police detective Steve Harrison; we read another Harrison story, "Lord of the Dead," back in 2019.  "House of Suspicion" was first printed here in The Second Book of Robert E. Howard and would go on to appear in various collections of Steve Harrison stories printed here in the land of the free and the home of the brave and over in Europe, the land of croissants and home of pizza.

Harrison is looking for a man who has gone missing, the star witness in a murder case.  He has received an anonymous note, inviting him to the dilapidated mansion of a once wealthy, now decaying, Southern family--Harrison is warned to conceal his true identity from those at the mansion--the writer will reveal himself and guide Harrison to the missing witness.  At the mansion Harrison meets four people.  We've got the last member of the family.  We've got his uncle, rendered deaf, blind and dumb by disease.  We've got the hugely muscular black servant.  And last but not least we've got the biracial ("mulatto") maid.  Someone keeps trying to kill Harrison--throwing a knife at him from the shadows, tossing a water moccasin into his room, dumping poison in his coffee, etc.  Who wrote the letter?  Was the letter sincere or a trap?  Who is trying to kill Harrison and why?  Is that guy really deaf, dumb and blind or is he shamming?  And where is that witness?

There is some mystery business with clues and people concealing their identities and so forth, but mostly this story is about violence and death, with people beating up, blowing up, shooting up and stabbing (up?) other people on purpose or by mistake.  Much blood is spilt!  I enjoyed "The House of Suspicion," though it lacks the personality and atmosphere of "The Good Knight" and "Knife-River Prodigal"--the narration is third-person omniscient, and Harrison and the other characters are quite nondescript, cogs in the grinding gears of the plot.

**********

Our first two stories brought a smile to my face, and the violence in the third is pretty effective; we have here three undemanding and easy-to-read entertainments.  If you are a Howard fan, The Second Book of Robert E. Howard is definitely worth your time.  I paid ten bucks for mine, which seems like a good price, based on what copies are going for on ebay (mine is also in good shape--it was in one of those plastic bags at the store and I think I'm the first to read it.)  There is a 1980 Berkley printing with a Ken Kelly cover, which I assume is the same text, but Jeff Jones fans will definitely want a Zebra edition, with the great wraparound cover and the eight interior illustrations featuring skulls and bare male flesh.  I have to warn you, though, that "The Hand of the Black Goddess," though promised on the back cover, is not actually in this volume.  If isfdb is to be believed, "The Hand of the Black Goddess" seems to be a hard story to find; hopefully somebody will reprint it soon.

I'll probably read more Howard soon, but first some science fiction stories by a Grand Master.

Frederik Pohl: "I Remember a Winter," "In the Problem Pit" and "Some Joys Under the Star"

British edition of In the Problem Pit, cover by Angus McKie

Sometimes I feel guilty because I spend good money on books I never read.  Sometimes I have pangs of conscience because I avoid authors of importance to the SF genre because they are goddamned commies.  Well, today let's salve my conscience a little and read three stories from the 1976 paperback Bantam Books edition of Frederik Pohl's In the Problem Pit which I bought back in May 2018 in North Carolina because I liked the red astronauts cover by Eddie Jones.  

Of all the commies out there, Pohl is one of those I am most likely to read because I liked Gateway and because Pohl was always fair to and supportive of anti-communist writers like Robert Heinlein and Poul Anderson; if Pohl could put politics aside to have healthy relationships with those guys it seems a little shabby of me to hold Pohl's own politics against him to the point that his books collect dust undisturbed on my shelf.  And in fact I have already read four stories from this copy of In the Problem Pit: "Rafferty's Reasons," "What To Do Until the Analyst Comes," "The Man Who Ate the World" and "To See Another Mountain."  Those stories were all first published in the 1950s and I condemned three of the four of them when I read them in December 2018.  Today let's read the three 1970s stories in the book with the hope I like them more than those Fifties pieces.

"I Remember a Winter" (1972)

Pohl admits in his little intro that this story, which he wrote on the balcony of a Beverly Hills hotel and was printed by Damon Knight in Orbit 11, isn't really science fiction.  What it is, according to me,  is a merely adequate literary story about how our lives are a random meaningless chaos, how society and the world are a huge machine in which each of us is a tiny moving part that affects all the other tiny moving parts in ways it is impossible to predict, impossible to assign responsibility or significant moral weight.

The narrator spend the six pages of the story reminiscing.  He and his half-Jewish, half-Irish, pal Paulie were kids in the 1930s and one day went to the library, where Paulie stole a copy of Beau Geste and became obsessed with the idea of becoming a soldier.  The narrator, meanwhile, was obsessed with Paulie's sister, Kitty.  He tries to date Kitty, to get her alone in some place where he can put the moves on her, but everywhere he takes her he finds some other person present, obstructing all his effort to seduce her.  For example, he takes her up on a fire escape, but they are interrupted by a man who has lost his job and is living on the upper reaches of the fire escape.  The narrator theorizes that the random chance of Paulie finding Beau Geste led to him stepping on a land mine at Salerno and suffering a crippling injury which killed him a few years later, and that the man on the fire escape stopped him and Kitty from getting married and leading totally different lives from those they ended up living, Kitty becoming a dancer, moving to Paris, and falling in love and marrying an SS officer during the German occupation of France, and he becoming a successful TV producer after working with the USO.  "Intentions don't matter," says the narrator--obviously the man who wrote Beau Geste wasn't trying to kill Paulie and obviously the man on the fire escape didn't intend to scotch his chance of marrying his Kitty.

Maybe "I Remember a Winter" is an extreme example of a New Wave story, a story that strives so hard to achieve mainstream literary merit that it has shed every single distinctive characteristic of science fiction.  Acceptable for what it is, but those looking for SF content will be disappointed.

"I Remember a Winter" shows up in the 2005 collection Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stories.

"In the Problem Pit" (1973)

This anthology's title story debuted in the special Frederik Pohl issue of F&SF, the somewhat crude (if we are being nice we say "naive"*) cover of which is by the second of Pohl's five wives, Carol (they separated in 1977.)  Yes, that is Fred on the cover.  Time for a haircut, Fred.  This issue also features Barry Malzberg's "The Helmet," which we read in 2022, and a portion of F. M. Busby's Cage A Man, a novel which I enjoyed when I read it long ago. 

*I had no interest in the fine arts until I went to college, and part of the reason was that the "serious" art I was exposed to at school and on TV as a child was all modern gimmickry by people like Picasso or naive dross by people like Grandma Moses, stuff that, especially to a child's eye, is less interesting and impressive than an illustrations in The Dungeon Master's Guide or a kid's book about dinosaurs.  Maybe if I had been exposed to Michelangelo or Raphael as a kid I would have been interested in painting and sculpture before I was 18.  

This is a long one--like 50 pages!  This better be good!

Arghh!  This is not good!  In his intro to the story, Pohl admits "In the Problem Pit" is basically a bunch of trivia he learned in conversations he had over a period of months thrown together, additional material being added that is based on his visit to Arecibo Observatory and time spent in an "encounter group."  And it shows.  Thumbs down! 

The story, if we can call it that, recounts the doings at what at first appears to be a sort of group therapy session slash artists' retreat in the near future of the 1990s, when there are 54 U.S. states and America has endured "pollution riots" and a short-lived revolution in California.  The group therapy retreat (they call it a "problem marathon") is held in a series of caves in Puerto Rico near the aforementioned abandoned radio telescope; among the sixteen participants are volunteers, professional staff of the managing institution, and draftees.  Draftees!  Yes, while in real life the government doesn't forcibly admit you to psychiatric care even if you punch an old woman in the face and kidnap a little girl, in the world of Pohl's lazy and ridiculous story, citizens accused of no crimes get conscripted into these subterranean "problem marathons."

In the second half of the story we learn that these sessions are an exercise in participatory democracy, Pohl pushing the idea that the best way to solve the world's problems is to collect a random sample of citizens--a sample leavened with professionals and filtered and sifted by the government to make sure the proper race and sex ratios are met--and have these people brainstorm identifications of and solutions to the world's problems.  The authorities monitor the sessions, and have a points system and score all the ideas that come out of a session and end the session when enough good ideas have been produced.  Pohl not only describes this system in tedious detail but lets his utopian freak flag really fly, providing us examples of the genius ideas this method has produced--the American defense establishment has been abolished (it is suggested war is now prevented with forcefields) and professional police departments are all augmented by a citizens' militia.

The problem marathons are unstructured and people are encouraged to raise their own personal problems as well as social and political problems, and, at the start of "In the Problem Pit," by way of introductions, we have to hear all about each of the sixteen character's sexual relationships, religious beliefs, and political affiliations.  The psychological problems these people have are banal, soap opera garbage we've already heard too many times before--a guy has been trying, without success, to win his father's approval; an artist can't maintain relationships with women; a woman can't find a man because she's fat; a woman can't find a man because she's tall; blah blah blah.  You'll be glad to hear that the characters are cured of their "hang ups" about love and sex and race and we are treated to scenes of people getting drunk and crying and expressing their affection for each other and having breakthroughs.

Then there are the political and social problems raised in the group.  A septuagenarian African-American factory owner is about to go bankrupt and be forced to lay off his 300 employees because he manufactures dental supplies and people's teeth don't decay anymore thanks to "halidated sugar."  A doctor complains that syphilis and gonorrhea could be wiped out if people were more conscientious about reporting their ailments and sexual partners.  A volunteer fireman complains that ordinary citizens don't detect and report fires quickly, leading to lots of property damage.  The members of the group sit around and offer possible solutions to these problems, and Pohl spends lots of ink describing the proposals, largely as a kind of joke.  For example, the fat girl thinks the dental supply manufacturer should retool to produce self-warming specula because when she visits the gynecologist the speculum is always very cold.  I'm calling this a joke, but the black businessman actually seizes upon this idea.

Pohl finishes up the story with tedious and incompetent melodrama--love triangles, an out-of-nowhere announcement from a black woman that she will soon die of sickle cell anemia, the black businessman declaring he doesn't care about other people and then showing up a few pages later with aid, having had a change of heart.

I don't blame a professional writer for trying to sell junk like this--everybody needs or loves money--but I blame F&SF editor Edward Ferman for buying it and inflicting it on readers.  But Ferman was not alone in shoveling this repulsive grab bag of boredom at SF fans.  In 1985, the indefatigable anthology team of Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh included "In the Problem Pit" in one of their innumerable volumes, one that has been published multiple times under several slightly different titles--one of them even bore the title The Mammoth Book of Fantastic Science Fiction.  ("Fantastic" is hardly the word I'd use to describe the mind-numbingly mundane "In the Problem Pit.")  "In the Problem Pit" was also reprinted in 1984 in the French edition of F&SF, in an issue with a cover that reminds me of Chriss Foss's work and portrays a battle against some kind of gigundo spider robot.  

"Some Joys Under the Star" (1973)

This is a cynical joke story illustrating how the United States, and maybe the entire human race, and maybe all intelligent life, is evil.  It has something of the form of that old cliched story about "for the want of a nail," describing how one event follows after another, from small cause to huge final effect.

A comet has come into view in the skies over Earth for the first time in 2000 years.  A seventeen-year-old boy takes a girl into Central Park on a date in hopes he will be able to get his hands on a girl for the first time; they are stalked by a serial killer.  The President of the United States and his Secretary of State decide to bomb Venezuela so they will give us their oil.  A loser boards an airliner intent on blowing it up to impress his mother, who never appreciated him; aboard the airplane is a senator who wants to shut down NASA as a waste of money.  The Irish have conquered the entire British Isles.  

We learn that our part of the galaxy is dominated by a sadistic imperialistic race of crab people.  (We meet plenty of crab people here at MPorcius Fiction Log, courtesy of Emil Petaja, Robert E. Howard, Alison Tellure and now Fred Pohl.)  The comet is one of their spy ships, keeping an eye on the Earth, manned by people of a subordinate race.  The comet crew scans Earth, realizes the human race has reached a high enough level of technology to pose a theoretical long term threat to the crab empire, and sends a message to the crabs to come blow up Earth.  The spies also hit the Earth with a ray projector that is meant to make people docile and happy, so they can't resist an attack of the crabs.  The projector is not very well designed, I guess, and some of the radiation bathes the spies and makes these subaltern aliens so happy they die of happiness.

The serial killer and the young virgins are made so happy that they become friends and have a threesome in Central Park.  Everybody in the US government and military is so happy the bombing is called off, and the Venezuelans are so affected by the happiness ray they decide to give us the oil out of friendship.  The airline bomber's bomb goes off by mistake, killing all on board.  The crab people don't destroy the Earth because they are too busy losing a war against another space empire, of one insect people.  

The senator died, so NASA is still around and sends a manned probe to the comet.  The astronauts find the spy ship, and bring back some alien equipment.  Fear of aliens leads to one-world government here on Earth, and the captured alien equipment jump starts the human race's technological development and soon the human race has conquered the galaxy, wiping out the insect people and unwittingly avenging the crab people and taking on the role of the crab people as sadistic interstellar imperialists.

This is better than "In the Problem Pit" but less ambitious and risk-taking--"Some Joys Under the Star" is lame filler.  Or so says me--the story was reprinted in Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stories and in one of the Asimov-Greenberg-Waugh troika's anthologies, the one on comets, so I guess opinions differ.

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Not good, I'm afraid, not good.  Are my harsh judgements a reflection of my prejudice?  Maybe so, but I hope I have offered some concrete apolitical reasons to look askance at these three stories and the entire In the Problem Pit collection.   

Aliens from Analog: Tellure, Schmidt, Stiegler

In late November we read four stories from the 1983 anthology Aliens from Analog, edited by Stanley Schmidt, physics professor and editor (1978-2013) of and contributor to Analog; the little "about the editor" note at the end of the book says Schmidt was one of the last writers "developed" by John W. Campbell, Jr.  Having read four other stories from the anthology over the years, let's finish it up by reading the three unread stories that remain, all by people I don't think I have read before: Schmidt himself, Alison Tellure, and Marc Stiegler; today's blog post will be one of those in which we tread previously unexplored territory.

"Green-Eyed Lady" by Alison Tellure (1982)

Tellure has five entries at isfdb.  "Green-Eyed Lady, Laughing Lady" was the cover story of the issue of Analog in which it debuted, and our German friends included it in a 1983 anthology of Analog stories, so Schmidt, and perhaps other SF editors, thought pretty highly of it.  Like all of today's stories, I'm reading Tellure's not in the original issue of Analog where it first appeared, but in a scan of Aliens from Analog, where for some reason its title is shortened to "Green-Eyed Lady."  (Is the title a hint this is a joke story?)

"Green-Eyed Lady" is one of those stories that strives to create aliens that are truly alien, not just hippies or communists or Nazis or American Indians in space.  In appearance, the people in the story are kind of like crabs, with six segmented legs and eye stalks and carapaces.  They have three sexes--male, female and "yd"--and a life cycle the transformations of which wreak great changes on their bodies and minds.  The crab people communicate through precise and rapid alterations of the color of individual cells of their bodies, like cuttlefish, I suppose.  Their culture is dominated by religion, and, in classic SF fashion, the story's plot involves our protagonist discovering the truth of her world which this religion reflects and conceals; we also see in "Green-Eyed Lady" the common SF theme of a small elite manipulating society through deception for its own good, and Tellure also and hints at a sense of wonder future in which the crab people conquer the universe.

The first half or so of the story is devoted to introducing us to a young female crab-person and her people's society.  The god worshipped by the crab people is a kaiju-sized crab monster, a yd who is practically immortal and lurks underwater.  The god requests a young person of particular intelligence be selected to serve as High Priestess, to act as an intermediary between the god and her people, and our green-eyed protagonist is the lucky individual tapped by the priesthood for this position.

In the second half of the story we learn the mundane reality behind the crab people's religion and watch as the god and the priesthood manipulate the main character, the general populace, and each other for their own ends.  The god has a rival, a monster tougher than he, and for hundreds of generations has been eugenically breeding the crab-people to be better soldiers and shaping their society--guiding their education policy, for example--so they will be fit to help him fight his enemy one day and, that accomplished, perhaps even develop a galactic civilization.

"Green-Eyed Lady" has little plot.  After learning about the setting and the two main characters we get a few pages on how they become friends despite the priestess' brief temper tantrum over the fact that her  relationship with the god has monopolized her time and energy such that all her other relationships have withered down to nothing.  Then we flash forward to the high priestess' old age and last day; this ending, which I guess is supposed to be an ironic surprise, sad and also funny, reveals that when its high priests get old the god eats them, and our heroine shows no reluctance in offering herself to be eaten by her god.

"Green-Eyed Lady" is pretty boring and I am on the fence on whether to give it a thumbs down or concede that it is barely acceptable.  Tellure's construction of this alien race and milieu is admirable enough, but the story as a whole is cold and unemotional--Tellure doesn't offer much plot or much character development and fails to create any suspense, to get the reader emotionally invested in the characters or what happens to them; I couldn't care less if so and so crab-person is alienated from her people or which monster wins the monster war or whatever.  We've heard the story's arguments--that religion is a scam used by elites to control people, and that elites manipulating people is often for the best--innumerable times from other Astounding-type authors like Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, Sturgeon and van Vogt already, and maybe that is why Schmidt likes the story, the fact that it hearkens back to the classic works of those SF titans.  Tellure does tinker with the template, having a female protagonist, for example, and maybe feminists will like that the story has a strong female lead who yells at people and tells them what to do and can also claim to be a victim of the elite.

"...And Comfort to the Enemy" by Stanley Schmidt (1969)

Here's a story by Schmidt published in Analog during the magazine's editorship by Campbell.  "...And Comfort to the Enemy" was an Analog cover story but doesn't seem to have been reprinted anywhere besides Schmidt's own Aliens from Analog.

We get a little italicized prologue at the start of "...And Comfort to the Enemy," a human narrator talking about how he and his wife moved from Earth to an alien planet to take part in colonizing it.  We learn that the intelligent natives, the Reska, have harsh laws which will punish any Reska who offends a human colonist.  Then comes the main story, told in the third person, that reveals the reason the Reska have these laws.

Schmidt's Reska act almost exactly like humans do--they sit around campfires and swap stories, they have space ships and firearms and radios and they travel around the galaxy, exploring and conducting research on alien planets.  Their own home world suffers pollution and overcrowding as a result of modern advances.  Schmidt even has them use English colloquialisms like calling a guy who is hard to convince a "hard-boiled egg."   

The plot of this main part of the story is about how a Reska research team was doing work on an alien planet and got in trouble with the natives who live in harmony with nature.  These natives don't have technology--they use animals and plants and fungi in place of technology--and in fact the Reska initially didn't suspect they had any intelligence at all.   In place of modern medicine they have leeches and similar creatures at their beck and call; there's a bird that can translate their language into the language of the Reska; they have mushrooms that act as a telephone or walkie talkie; hive insects run their agriculture.  If they want to fight--and "...And Comfort to the Enemy" is an action/horror story--they direct various armored beasts, sharp-beaked birds, and infectious germs to attack enemies.  These natives, seeing how the Reska are going to disrupt the delicate ecological balance of the planet, attack, capturing a Reska (most of the story focuses on his adventures) and take a sample from him with which to tailor a disease for use in exterminating the Reska.  

The disease starts killing the Reska expedition and even spreads back to the Reska home world and other Reska outposts and colonies.  The Reska captive convinces the natives to give them the cure for the plague in return for the technology behind interstellar travel, which the natives can't duplicate with an animal or plant.  Reska's space civilization suffers a population loss of 41%, and learns to be accommodating to all alien intelligent races they meet for fear of their unexpected powers.  The twist ending of "...And Comfort to the Enemy" is that the captive Reska has tricked the plague-crafting natives--he is not a scientist but merely the research team's cook and can't explain to them how to build a spaceship.

For what it achieves, this story feels long; the italicized frame story and other explanatory passages feel unnecessary--we'll hear about some event in the boring and bland third-person omniscient narration, and then we'll hear one Reska tell another Reska about it in boring and bland dialogue.  This story is essentially bland; Schmidt didn't get me emotionally involved with the plight of the characters, even though they are living through a horror story--one being held captive by aliens, the others facing extermination of their race as over a third of their population falls to a disease.  Maybe an intelligent civilization which uses genetic engineering of living thing for all its technology was fresh in 1969, but in 2024 it didn't feel fresh to me.  We're judging "...And Comfort to the Enemy" to be barely acceptable filler.

"Petals of Rose" by Marc Steigler (1981)

"Petals of Rose" was the cover story of its issue of Analog; we also see on the cover an ad for the short-lived magazine Science Fiction Digest, which it appears offered excerpts of works by major genre writers (e.g., Robert Heinlein's Friday, Stephen King's Cujo, and Tanith Lee's The Silver Metal Lover) as well as essays on SF (e.g., Vincent Price and his son on what makes a story scary) and film reviews by Charles Platt (including of films I've never even heard of, like Heartbeeps and Modern Problems, both of which sound horrible--Chevy Chase is one of those comedians whose face and voice I find not amusing but annoying) and had as its raison d'etre guiding the fan through the overwhelming volume of SF material available in the early 1980s.  It seems SF fans didn't want such a guide; Science Fiction Digest was fated to fold after only four issues.

In "Petals of Rose" we have a story that dramatizes and perhaps exaggerates the ability of writers, intellectuals, shrinks and eugenicists to figure out problems and solve them, to alter the course of history by knocking over governments and radically reforming societies.  This is also a densely written story, with lots of crazy ideas packed into a relatively small space burdened with very little fat; of today's three stories, "Petals of Rose" is also the one that most succeeds at portraying--and eliciting in the reader--human emotion.  I can moderately recommend this one.

The Rosan people, who are covered in scale-like feathers that look a little like rose petals, of planet Khayyam (named by the furry Lazarine people after the poet) have an even more bizarre lifecycle than those of the crab people in Tellure's story.  A Rosan spends a year or so as an egg, then two years as an armored larva out in the inhospitable desert of the planet surface.  Then he or she crawls back underground to the site of his or her parent's deaths to eat from mom and dad's brains.  After this feast the Rosan transforms into a bipedal person with super intelligence, a photographic memory, and most significantly, the memories of the parents upon whose brains he or she just dined.  An adult Rosan only lives for thirty-six hours or so--these people have to cram their life's work into those little more than a Terran day (fortunately they don't have to waste any time eating or sleeping, as the body fat stored while a larva is enough to power them nonstop for those 36 hours.)  Generally a Rosan continues the work or his or her parents, being fully equipped with pater and mater's memories, after all.  (The memories of more distant ancestors--grandparents, great-grandparents, etc.--are there but increasingly faint and hard to access.)  

Many years before the start of Steigler's story, a human grad student in psychology, Sorrel, read books about the Rosans of planet Khayyam and came up with a theory to make their society more efficient.  In traditional Rosan society, Mom and Dad keel over, and three years later their larval brats eat their brains and continue work on Mom and Dad's projects.  Sorrel in his dissertation suggested that Rosan larva eat not three-year-old brains to which they are genetically tied but the brains of people who died in the last few days, who of course can't possibly be their parents.  In this fashion, there is no three-year gap in the pursuit of those projects.  When the Rosan people learned of this theory about half of them embraced it; these reformers went to war against the conservatives who wanted to preserve the old way of doing things, and overthrew them.  The current society of Khayyam practically worships Sorrel as a god, he being the man who drew up the blueprint for their current way of life.

As the story begins, Sorrel has been summoned by the Lazarine people.  The human race fought a war with these furry characters long ago, the humans the aggressors because they envied the Lazarines--the  humans were also the losers.  Sorrel, like many humans, hates the Lazarines--his wife died in the war.  The Lazarines predict that another war will erupt between human and Lazarine, and wish it wouldn't--they predict it will be a genocidal war, but can't predict (or so they say) which race will survive.  The Lazarines have also come up with a theory that will allow for FTL communication, and have hopes such easy communication will prevent the war.  To put the theory into practice, to build an FTL communications system, will take lots and lots of research and experimentation, and the Lazarines recognize that the Rosans, with their super brains can build this communications system much faster than they can.  But how to convince the Rosans, who each only have adult lives of 36 hours, to devote those 36 hours to building this system?  Well, get the man they see as a god, Sorrel, to ask them nicely and in person!

Sorrel heads to Khayyam, the world he revolutionized but has never been to, as the head of a small party of human engineers.  Sorrel knows jack about engineering, but puts his skills as a shrink to use managing the engineers' culture shock at having to work with teams of natives who die every single day and who are much smarter than humans.  Envy and jealousy are major themes of the story--some humans envy Rosan intelligence, but some Rosans envy human longevity.  A Rosan generation is a single day, so political developments that might take years on Earth take place in days on Khayyam, and an anti-human political party takes over the planet and Sorrel has to figure out how to foil their program of halting the FTL project.  In the fracas most of the brains with FTL knowledge are destroyed, but Sorrel has hidden some brains against this eventuality.  Then Sorrel uses hypnosis to recover the deeply buried memories of the Rosan who first translated the human's paradigm-shifting dissertation into the Rosan language and, sort of, resurrect that translator in the body of one of his descendants--the Rosans treat this as the second coming of their greatest prophet.  (As in Tellure's story, religion is a tool with which the long-lived elite manipulate the development of a short-lived society to their own ends, but also for their own good.)                       

The dramatic ending has Sorrel risking his life in an effort to save the resurrected prophet from an assassination attempt.  The sentimental ending has this prophet taken to the surface of Khayyam to be the first adult Rosan to see a sunrise in many generations.  The twist ending reveals what has been hinted at, that the Lazarines manipulating Sorrel and the human race live for 25,000 years--the Lazarines have exactly the same relationship to us humans that humans have to the Rosans, humans envying Lazarine longevity and Lazarines admiring and taking advantage of human industriousness.

"Petals of Rose" would be reprinted alongside Tellure's "Green-Eyed Lady, Laughing Lady" in that German anthology Analog 6 and also the 1990 Stiegler collection The Gentle Seduction.

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Astounding/Analog is, I believe, the SF magazine most associated with science ideas and least with traditional literary values or popular thrills-and-chills entertainment value, and these three stories certainly have lots of speculative biology ideas and their authors certainly endeavor to extrapolate on what sort of societies these strange biologies might produce.  Unfortunately, only Stiegler produces a good story out of his ideas--Tellure and Schmidt's stories have structural and style problems that render them unengaging, though not terrible; if the ideas are what you really care about, maybe you'll like them more than I did.  

James White, 1955: "The Star Walk," "Boarding Party," and "Dynasty of One"

I recently enjoyed James White's 1963 story "Counter Security" in its appearance in Groff Conklin's 13 Above the Night.  Then I read a 1982 interview of White by Darrell Schweitzer that appears in Richard Geis' fun zine Science Fiction Review in which White offers lots of information on his career and his relationships with and opinions of John W. Campbell, Jr., John Carnell, Michael Moorcock and Bob Shaw; I found White to be a likable guy with interesting stuff to say.  So today let's explore White's early career by reading  three stories printed in British magazines edited by Carnell in 1955, the year of the launch of the first nuclear submarine, approval of the Salk polio vaccine, and the opening of the Tappan Zee Bridge, which I have fond memories of riding across numerous times during the New York period of my life (this landmark has since been destroyed and replaced.)

"The Star Walk" 

"The Star Walk" debuted in Carnell's New Worlds and does not seem to have ever been reprinted.  I suppose we could call it a forgotten story, but not for lack of merit--"The Star Walk" is a well-crafted noirish action adventure tale full of cool futuristic weapons and vehicle and a plot propelled by the desperate desires of White's characters, each of whom has a believable personality and is driven by a multiplicity of motives.  There's even something of a paradigm-shift/sense of wonder ending!  Thumbs up for "The Star Walk!"

Mankind has developed FTL star ships and colonized scores of planets.  But there is no FTL communication, so messages between planets have to be carried by ships, which is expensive, FTL travel consuming lots of fuel.  Couriers, known as C-men, make good money carrying news and the latest technical developments and scientific discoveries between colonized systems--these tapes are so valuable that their ships are armed with the latest force fields and energy and missile weapons.  Even so, a ruthless organized crime group led by the ruthless and ambitious Sundberg is always trying to catch C-vessels and seize their tapes and sell them cut rate on the black market or by impersonating legit C-men.  Sundberg's agents are especially active on the edges of human civilization, where the relatively poor frontier worlds crave news and new data even more than do the planets near the center of settled space, have to pay more for tapes and have less ability to pay, and where the central government has much less ability to enforce the law.

Our main character is a former C-man, 38-year-old Carmichael, who lost his job thanks to the skullduggery of an unknown party that left him stranded on one of the most backward of frontier worlds for years; the whole time he has been in agony, missing the life aboard a space ship that he loved.  C-men are all highly intelligent individuals who have received extensive training in useful skills, and so Carmichael quickly rose within the hierarchy of the sparsely populated colony and is today engaged to the attractive daughter of the colony's top administrator--Carmichael will probably be appointed admin himself some day.  But these big-fish-in-a-small-pond achievements don't mean he doesn't wish he was still navigating the ether in his own space ship!

As our story begins a C-ship arrives but the C-man inside it, 23-year-old Carlsen, acts suspiciously.  Then another such ship lands on the other side of the colony, its crew claiming to be Courier Inspectors chasing a renegade, but these guys also act suspiciously.  One of these ships, at least, is commanded by a dangerous rogue courier or a murderous thug in the employ of Sundberg!  But how to tell which, if either, is a legitimate C-man?  For his part, Carmichael sees a chance to seize Carlsen's spaceship himself when the C-man is revealed to be severely injured--sure, that is stealing, but Carmichael'd love to get off this inhospitable rock and back into space with tapes that can make him rich, and if Carlsen is a criminal it's not really stealing, is it?  A complication arises when Carmichael's 19-year-old fiancé Evelyn, who has medical training, seems to be falling in love with the mysterious--but younger!--Carlsen while tending the man's wounds!  Another wrinkle--Evelyn's father is desperate to get the two courier ships off his planet because if they start shooting their ray cannon and atomic missiles at each other the colony he is responsible for might get wiped out in the crossfire!  

White offers us a love triangle, moral dilemmas, mysteries, and battles and chases on the planet surface and in space, and handles all these elements entertainingly.  It turns out that there is a lot more at stake than Carmichael's ability to get off the crummy colony and keep his girl--a new version of the FTL drive, one that uses less fuel and so will revolutionize the galactic economy and permit colonization of other galaxies, has been invented, but its adoption relies on Carmichel making the right decisions and leveraging his skills as a spaceman to foil the bad guys and prevent an interstellar war from erupting that might make the evil Sundberg dictator of humanity!

A creditable piece of entertainment that I really enjoyed.

"Boarding Party"

Like "The Star Walk," "Boarding Party" is a good action adventure story full of future weapons and other technology, featuring space ships and space battles, populated by characters with personality who have to navigate conflicting goals and inclinations, and ending with a society-wide paradigm shift.  Thumbs up!

Earth is at war with mysterious aliens whose ships are big globes that shoot little globes at Terran vessels; these projectiles mess with the molecular structure of Earth machinery and kill people by damaging their nervous systems.  Actual alien individuals have never been seen, just these ships.

Our main character, a little like the hero of "Counter Security," is something of a slacker or underachiever.  He is the head medical officer of Earth's most powerful battleship, but robots do all the doctoring--he hasn't touched a human patient in two years!--and he spends all his spare time in his room listening to music, not learning the ins and outs of the battleship and bonding with the other crew members, like the other, more dedicated and conscientious officers do.

Three alien globes attack the battleship, and the ship is pretty much wrecked, though the captain of the ship does figure out some valuable info on the aliens.  The battleship has lost its ability to achieve FTL speeds and bring that data to Earth, but maybe its life boat can!  The captain has a desperate plan for some of the vessel's survivors to escape in the life boat, and it requires the protagonist to get over his psychological issues (not only is he lazy compared to the other space naval officers, but he isn't very brave) and accomplish some pretty difficult tasks in the treacherous passageways and on the shattered surface of the crippled warship.  In the climax to the story, our hero (again like the main character of "Counter Security") becomes the first human to make contact with the aliens--the war is all a misunderstanding!  The aliens are energy creatures--those globes aren't ships, but people!--and what the humans have been taking for attacks are in fact catastrophically unsuccessful efforts to communicate that proved incompatible with the materials of which human space ships and space suits are made--the aliens never meant to hurt anyone.  The war is over!  

"Boarding Party," after its initial appearance in New Worlds, was reprinted in the 1982 White collection Futures Past.  

"Dynasty of One"

"The Star Walk" and "Boarding Party" are action adventure stories in which psychology and ideas play a big role; "Dynasty of One," a much shorter story, is all ideas and psychology.

Tate's father, a great inventor, centuries ago invented longevity treatments able to keep cats and dogs alive forever if administered on a regular basis.  But when applied to a human, these treatments have additional radical effects.  They give you a high IQ and a perfect memory.  Awesome!  Or maybe not!  The treatments also put you through a horrific ordeal--in three seconds you relive every thing you did in your life, and with your super IQ you realize all the blunders and immoralities you committed, how they hurt people and disgraced yourself!  This experience is so harrowing that only one man upon whom the treatment has been tested has resisted the pressure and escaped death from overwhelming guilt--Tate is that man!  

Tate has been alive for hundreds of years, getting the treatment every forty years.  With his superbrain he developed a FTL drive and Earth subsequently became a benevolent space empire with many nonhuman races under its authority--Tate, of course, is Emperor of this empire.  As a relatively good man, he is able to survive the ordeal of the longevity treatment, but it is still a tough ride every four decades--as Emperor he has committed some boners which have led to millions of deaths.  As the story begins Tate feels the stress of leadership is getting to him--will he survive today's treatment or finally succumb to guilt?

There's not a lot of plot to "Dynasty of One."  Tate survives yet another treatment, and afterwards receives good news--some aliens have survived the treatment themselves, survivors of a race who severely suffered due to one of Tate's errors.  Tate takes this as evidence the people of the galaxy are progressing due to his efforts, and this, I think, means he will suffer less guilt and continue to survive treatments indefinitely.  Presumably the day will come when every intelligent being in the galaxy is honest and pacific, and Tate's benevolent dictatorship will be unnecessary.

Moderately good.

"Dynasty of One" premiered in Carnell's Space Fantasy and would also reappear in Futures Past.

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As I guess I have told my loyal readers many times, I love stories in which guys put on spacesuits and face the hazards of vacuum and zero gee and wield ray guns, and stories about immortality.  So these three White stories are right up my alley.  More importantly, White does a good job handling these classic SF themes and incorporates into the stories engaging characters.  Quite good; I expect to read more White in the future.

Kathe Koja and Barry N Malzberg, 1995: "The Unchained," "Buyer's Remorse" and "Three Portraits from Heisenberg"

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are tracking down collaborations between Kathe Koja and Barry Malzberg on the internet archive.  Today we've got three stories published in 1995, the year of the foundation of the WTO, the murder trial of O. J. Simpson, and many exciting developments in the campaign to uncover and remove weapons of mass destruction from Saddam Hussein's Iraq.  I don't think any of these stories have been reprinted after their initial appearances (I'm not counting the 1999 paperback printing of the anthology our second story appears in.) 

"The Unchained" 

"The Unchained" appears in Tombs, an odd sort of volume with annoying typography and a horrendous pun introduction by Forrest J. Ackermann that you have to see to believe.  

Here we have a somewhat opaque story that I believe seeks to validate both Christianity and homosexual relationships and in fact to reconcile these two things.  We switch between two narratives.  In the late 20th century we’ve got the last hours of life of a man who abandoned his wife and kids to take up with another man—he is in the hospital, dying of AIDS, tended to by a cigarette-smoking nurse and by his gay lover.  We are led to believe the dying man’s family doesn’t approve of the boyfriend, but the nurse insists the lover be considered his real family.  The other narrative is conveyed to us in the voice of Jesus Christ himself and tells the story of the raising of Lazarus from the dead from the point of view of the son of God.  The penultimate line of "The Unchained" seems to echo T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock and the final line, I think, endorses the Christian belief in eternal life, or at least the idea that death is a liberation.

Much of what I say above is conjecture; Koja and Malzberg don’t actually use words like “gay” or “AIDS” or "Jesus;” I am just interpreting the clues.  The point of the story, I guess, is to, by equating Lazarus and the AIDS patient, argue that God thinks homosexual love is as legitimate as heterosexual love and people who die of AIDS are just as likely to get into heaven as anybody else.  SF writers generally think religion is a load of bunk, and focus their ire on Christianity in particular, but this story seems to take Christianity seriously, to, for the most part, refrain from showing contempt for believers.

(There is a passage that seems to ridicule the idea of people abstaining from sex, but the lover in the story seems to somehow identify with those who abstain because he, unlike so many other gay men, hasn't contracted AIDS.  He refers to a "Mr. Play-It-Safe" and to a "sole survivor," and it is not clear whether he is applying these appellations to himself or to a theoretical advocate for abstinence.  Is there any chance this guy, though in a gay relationship, has been avoiding actual penetrative sex and thus preserved his health?  Is the fact that he doesn't normally smoke cigarettes and only does so after his lover dies and the nurse forces a pack of Kools on him a clue that he is health conscious and, just as he has been exercising caution to avoid lung cancer, has been cautious about avoiding AIDS?)   

Another remarkable thing about "The Unchained" is its pervasive presentations of disgusting images and of descriptions of horrible smells.  Again and again in the 20th-century scenes we are told about cigarette butts and other sickening trash, like used condoms, left on the ground, and in the scenes in ancient Judea we hear about how bad the dead Lazarus smells.  I guess the idea is that God created and loves all the universe, not just the healthy and beautiful parts, but the ugly and spoiled parts as well.

What of the title?  Does it refer to the chains of death being loosed from Lazarus, and all Christians?  The sloughing off of a diseased body by those who die in old age?  The chains of law and custom that render homosexuals second-class citizens but which in the 1990s were in the process of being removed?  "The Unchained" leaves us with a lot to think about--it feels like every line strikes a chord or gives us something to chew over--this is the kind of economy I admire in fiction and writing in general.  

A challenging story that pushes the mainstream liberal line on gay marriage but not in a boring tiresome way and offers a lot more as well.  I can't tell you it is fun, but I can give it a thumbs up for being well-written, provocative and engaging.  People interested in thoughtful depictions in SF of Christ and Christianity, and of 1990s depictions of AIDS and other issues of importance to the LGBetc community, should check out "The Unchained."  

"Buyer's Remorse" 

How to Save the World is an anthology of stories in which SF writers offer solutions to social problems, and it has one of those hilariously grandiose and self-important introductions in which the editor--for this book Charles Sheffield--expresses the hope this book will offend people and maybe even be banned--oh, please don't throw me in that briar patch!

There are apparently stories in this thing that offer solutions to  racism and pollution and overpopulation and lots of other real or purported problems facing humanity in 1995, but Koja and Malzberg's story goes the whole hog and suggests, or at least examines the possibility of, abandoning this world entirely--physically, spiritually, psychologically.

"Buyer's Remorse" is a series of letters, or I guess electronic messages, received by what amounts to an advice columnist of the 23rd century, and his or her replies.  One correspondent is spending all of his or her time in virtual reality, even eating and having sex in a virtual world, and his or her friends are trying to get the writer to spend more time in the real world.  Another person talks about how there is no longer any such thing as perversity, there no longer being any moral judgements.  The message of a third correspondent makes clear that people in this future all live in domed or subterranean cities with more or less self-sufficient and carefully controlled environments and ecologies isolated from the outside world; this seeker after advice talks about how somebody has contaminated his or her own dome by cultivating eggs.  A fourth complains of a mate's overuse of aphrodisiacs and other drugs and searches for other partners--it becomes clear that use of drugs is the norm in the 23rd century to suppress some feelings and summon others.  

"Buyer's Remorse" is long and slow and accomplished very little.  The advice seekers are all long-winded and pen very flowery letters, but none of them offer compelling images or betray engaging personalities.  "Buyer's Remorse" doesn't have a conventional plot, and much of its text--the replies of the "Courtesy & Advisement Person" in particular, is difficult-to-decipher and eye-glazingly boring philosophical discussion.  I guess the plot and character elements of "Buyer's Remorse" consist of the reader's journey as he uncovers the personality of the C&AP and the nature of this future dystopia, but this material is not satisfying.  "The Unchained" was not an easy read but it was sprinkled with passages which trigger emotion in the reader and argue some kind of point, and trying to figure out the more difficult passages of "The Unchained" yielded something of interest--what was up with the main characters and what were Koja and Malzberg trying to say about religion and the afterlife?  The challenge of "Buyer's Remorse" yields SF banalities--man ruined the environment so everybody lives in hives and uses drugs and video games to make life tolerable.  Koja and Malzberg throw in oblique references to Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald and name check Immanuel Kant and Thomas Erasmus--and even one of Malzberg's own characters, Harry the Flat from Underlay, one of Malzberg's best books--but these oases of interest in the dull desert don't do much to bring the story to life.  Gotta give this one a thumbs down.

"Three Portraits from Heisenberg" 

I haven't spent much time with Omni, the covers of which always gave the magazine the air of something sensationalist and exploitative, what with all the advertised stories about UFOs and ESP, expanding your consciousness, and sex.  The issue that includes the sole printing of "Three Portraits from Heisenberg" offers articles on Roswell, dinosaurs, and the afterlife, as well as an ad for a CD-ROM of forgotten science fiction novels introduced by Leonard Nimoy.  (Did Nimoy really take time off from counting his quatloos and photographing nude women to read Stanton Coblentz's The Day the World Stopped, Manly Banister's The Conquest of Earth and George Henry Smith's Druid's World?  Doesn't seem logical.) 

The Fall 1995 issue of Omni is pretty slick, with lots of bland but high quality illustrations and a story by Ray Bradbury that I might read some day--the magazine had the ability to get contributors who were talented and/or had big names.  The cover of this issue, I believe one of the very last, illustrates my feelings about Omni--the painting of a naked child is well crafted, but putting a naked child on the cover of a magazine in 1995 feels a little creepy, and the all caps text "WE'RE BACK!" and "BIGGER, BETTER, BOLDER" feels desperate and low class.

"Three Portraits from Heisenberg" has what I am taking to be its T. S. Eliot reference (to Gerontion this time) at its beginning instead of at its end, though of course the big allusion in this story is to Heisenberg and his principle that you can't really know the location and velocity of a particle at the same time, or something like that.  The protagonist of this story is Karen the plasma physicist.  She recently broke up with her boyfriend George, who worked in the same research facility.  It seems they had a lot of sex but it also seems the sex was unsatisfying for her, and that George cheated on her, though it is not 100% clear.  Anyway, Karen keeps seeing multiple reflections of herself in windows at the lab; these sometimes speak to her.  I think these represent Karens who might have been had she made different choices in her life.  There is a lot of confusing blah blah about whether she is observing these other Karens or they are observing her.  By the end of the story Karen is insane, calling up George to babble about being watched and to laugh and laugh and laugh.

This story is even worse than "Buyer's Remorse," is even more pointless as a whole and even less easy to understand on a sentence by sentence basis.  The story is quite brief, but the sentences and paragraphs are long and are full of metaphors that don't convey anything of value:

As you humped so frantic and juiceless in the wretched bed, so the stars and planets tumble haplessly toward final implosion.

Like the galaxies before time, like the blind, bare animals of her breasts sinking underneath his grunts.

I'm not an observer, the face said, you're the observer.  I'm the particle in remission at the heart of the neutron star whose reaction is your anti-reaction.

A character confronted by the choices she has made, by the different careers and relationships she might have had, is a good idea for a literary story, but marrying it to Heisenberg and all these references to planets, stars and galaxies doesn't supplement or enhance the presentation of the topic, doesn't make it more entertaining or more moving--it makes it more boring and more confusing.  It feels like Koja and Malzberg just cooked this up to sell to Omni, a magazine they knew would pay for a story that integrated science jargon, space and sex, no matter how superficially or clumsily.

Bad!

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It is no surprise that these stories have not been reprinted, as all three of them are "challenging" in that they are hard to read.  But one of them, "The Unchained," is also "challenging" in that it addresses issues about which people have strong opinions and tries to get an emotional rise out of you by pushing your buttons about homosexuality and Christianity and by describing stuff that is upsetting (your loved one is dying!) and disgusting (it smells and there are cigarette butts everywhere!)  In "Buyer's Remorse" and "Three Portraits from Heisenberg" we have to hack our way through jungle-like sentences and paragraphs and all we get when we reach the clearing are banal plots and ideas--if we wreck the world we'll have to live underground and spend our time getting high and having cybersex and sometimes we regret the life decisions we have made.  Living in a wrecked world and regretting your career and relationship decisions are good foundations for stories, but to build entertaining or thought-provoking stories upon these foundations the author has to craft beautiful sentences or compelling characters or suspenseful drama or something like that, and what Koja and Malzberg offer in "BR" and "3PH" is long-winded and pretentious obfuscation that ultimately signifies little.  Disappointing.